Hard Drive on 8800AXL/R2. Size & Format?

Discussions for BiPAC 8800 series: 8800NL, 8800NLR2, 8800AXL, 8800AXLR2
Post Reply
KevinR2
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2018 2:26 pm

Hard Drive on 8800AXL/R2. Size & Format?

Post by KevinR2 »

The 8800AXL/R2 manual is very terse on usb support...

Anyone had success in hanging a drive off the USB port?
Any information on maximum drive capacity?
Does it support NTFS or only a FAT? Is FAT actually FAT32?

(I've found threads with mixed success on other models, but nothing on this one.).
Thanks.
billion_fan
Posts: 5374
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2011 4:30 pm

Re: Hard Drive on 8800AXL/R2. Size & Format?

Post by billion_fan »

KevinR2 wrote: Thu Apr 11, 2019 12:16 pm The 8800AXL/R2 manual is very terse on usb support...

Anyone had success in hanging a drive off the USB port?
Any information on maximum drive capacity?
Does it support NTFS or only a FAT? Is FAT actually FAT32?

(I've found threads with mixed success on other models, but nothing on this one.).
Thanks.
It should support NTFS and FAT 32.

Once you plug up your hard drive and login to the router you should see your hard drive listed under 'Configuration >> USB >> Storage Device Info'

If I remember correctly 2tb is the max size
KevinR2
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Oct 20, 2018 2:26 pm

Re: Hard Drive on 8800AXL/R2. Size & Format?

Post by KevinR2 »

I've spent the afternoon playing with a hard drive plugged in via usb. The results are very mixed, but weak or broken.

Router is still on the d5 original firmware, but no fixes are listed for usb, samba, FTP, etc on later versions.

As mentioned in my OP there's no info in the manual on limits and formats so I've played with numerous combinations. (There are a few posts about implying that upto 4tb drives are ok).

Formatted 3tb drive on windows 7 using both windows tools and easeUS tools.
As expected exFAT is not recognised at all.
FAT32 and NTFS are partly supported.
They both show up in windows SMB networking. You can read and write them.
The router recognises both MBR and GUID/GPT partition tables. Of course you can't define more than 2TB if you use MBR for formatting.

Biggest Problem, NO GUI:
At no point have the volumes appeared in the USB storage config page. So you can never cleanly unmount them.
As it thinks there are no volumes you also can't define users or enable DLNA.
I checked the telnet interface and there are no apparent commands included for unmount or users.

Problem 2, Numbering:
Oddly the numbering of the logical mounted volume has increased each time I reconfigured the drive. So I'm currently seeing disk1_5 even though the drive currently contains only one FAT32 partition under MBR. Even rebooting the router preserves the high numbering. It does (mostly?) keep the same numbering until you repartion. It's unclear if this endless numbering might become an issue or when it would rollover. (This might just be a feature of the formatting tools?)

BONUS share:
Once samba is awakened by the usb drive the volumes show up below a share called admin as you might expect. Another share called public shows up and must be in ram as (small) files persist until you reboot. It's unclear what public is or does.

Annoying problem 3, BROKEN FTP:
FTP service woke up the first time I attached the drive. This appears to have locked onto disk1_1 even across reboots and this seems to (now?) be a broken mount from /mnt into /var/ftpd. The telnet df dislikes it, but there's no rm or unmount available to clean it. You can remote into the FTP server but I didn't dare write anything into the bogus mount. Equally the actual volumes available via SMB never show within the FTP server. You can't try other users than admin as the storage/user gui is also broken.

As I'd hoped to use the FTP server it's annoying this is broken.

HAS ANYONE HAD BETTER LUCK THAN ME???
ANY ADVICE???
billion_fan
Posts: 5374
Joined: Tue Jul 19, 2011 4:30 pm

Re: Hard Drive on 8800AXL/R2. Size & Format?

Post by billion_fan »

KevinR2 wrote: Wed May 01, 2019 8:35 pm I've spent the afternoon playing with a hard drive plugged in via usb. The results are very mixed, but weak or broken.

Router is still on the d5 original firmware, but no fixes are listed for usb, samba, FTP, etc on later versions.

As mentioned in my OP there's no info in the manual on limits and formats so I've played with numerous combinations. (There are a few posts about implying that upto 4tb drives are ok).

Formatted 3tb drive on windows 7 using both windows tools and easeUS tools.
As expected exFAT is not recognised at all.
FAT32 and NTFS are partly supported.
They both show up in windows SMB networking. You can read and write them.
The router recognises both MBR and GUID/GPT partition tables. Of course you can't define more than 2TB if you use MBR for formatting.

Biggest Problem, NO GUI:
At no point have the volumes appeared in the USB storage config page. So you can never cleanly unmount them.
As it thinks there are no volumes you also can't define users or enable DLNA.
I checked the telnet interface and there are no apparent commands included for unmount or users.

Problem 2, Numbering:
Oddly the numbering of the logical mounted volume has increased each time I reconfigured the drive. So I'm currently seeing disk1_5 even though the drive currently contains only one FAT32 partition under MBR. Even rebooting the router preserves the high numbering. It does (mostly?) keep the same numbering until you repartion. It's unclear if this endless numbering might become an issue or when it would rollover. (This might just be a feature of the formatting tools?)

BONUS share:
Once samba is awakened by the usb drive the volumes show up below a share called admin as you might expect. Another share called public shows up and must be in ram as (small) files persist until you reboot. It's unclear what public is or does.

Annoying problem 3, BROKEN FTP:
FTP service woke up the first time I attached the drive. This appears to have locked onto disk1_1 even across reboots and this seems to (now?) be a broken mount from /mnt into /var/ftpd. The telnet df dislikes it, but there's no rm or unmount available to clean it. You can remote into the FTP server but I didn't dare write anything into the bogus mount. Equally the actual volumes available via SMB never show within the FTP server. You can't try other users than admin as the storage/user gui is also broken.

As I'd hoped to use the FTP server it's annoying this is broken.

HAS ANYONE HAD BETTER LUCK THAN ME???
ANY ADVICE???
I would suggest trying the latest firmware link below, (with this firmware its suggested to upgrade with factory default settings, and manually reconfigure the device again)

http://gofile.me/3XbRY/QzJFmxFKR

Let me know if you have further issues, and I can report them to our engineers and see what they can do :D
Post Reply